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Comment by sattoshi | Hacker News Reader

I think he is highlighting that the problem is not the weapons but rather the people wielding them.

These people will use the next best thing and the bans only really affect law abiding citizens.

If the ban would only affect law abiding citizens, then why aren't the criminals described here using already banned knives or guns?

I think I expressed myself poorly. They aren't using banned things because they are banned. Instead, they go the easier route of killing people with non-banned things.

gun murders per million people UK: 0.236 gun murders per million people US: 32.57

I dunno, that feels like it's working.

I read a statistic stating that somewhere around 80% of the violent crime in America takes place in about 5% of the counties.

In other words, there are certain niche demographics in America that are pulling up those gun murder stats, and it's generally not a problem for most people who enjoy 2nd Amendment protections.

This article:

http://www.ofm.wa.gov/researchbriefs/2016/brief079.pdf

shows that 5 counties in the state of Washington account for almost all the state's violent crime.

This chart

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm.htm

shows a wide variation among US states. Curiously, some of the states with the lowest stats have essentially no gun control. So its more complicated that it might seem.

Gun control is not a magic solution for firearm killings (after all it only affects law-abiding citizens who, by definition, are not murderers).

E.g.: here in Brazil it is almost impossible to legally own a firearm but we had 212 firearm-murders per million people in 2014 (Source: http://brasileiros.com.br/2016/08/o-brasil-e-o-pais-que-mais... ).

So seems like it's easy in Brazil to illegally own a firearm. I suspect the UK avoided a similar outcome by not only making it illegal, but also policing in such a way as to make it difficult to illegally own a firearm.

Add in the Switzerland and Norway figures and things look less clear. But here is a large dataset with some nice infographics.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-ho...

It's weird to see a bunch of people trying to refute this very clear point: we don't have many guns and so we have very little gun crime.

  gun murders per million people UK:  0.236
  gun murders per million people US: 32.57

You are being very very selective with the data. Assuming good faith please refer to the rather larger dataset with gun ownership and gun crime data for many countries provided in another post.

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